Anyone know of a good managed hosting (or vps) for Immich that doesn't break the bank? I have about 5TB of photos/videos and I don't feel safe without a remote backup. I played with self hosting and I really (really) like Immich but I keep Google photos/Drive just to ensure I won't lose anything.
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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Reverse proxy if your home internet is decent.
50mbps upload is fine for me.
I had it running on a mini PC with 8tb of storage, but I couldn't get the latency down to where I want it, so I moved it to a VPS.
Problem with that is there is no backup in case of flood/fire/tornado etc.
Continue to self host, create a yearly backup on external harddrive which you keep offline at a trusted family members house.
I do something similar
I have a raspberry pi and a HD, with daily rsync and snapshots (monthly retained indefinitely, weekly retained for a month, daily retained for a week). It's at family's house, connected to my home via WireGuard via a VPS. Tailscale (or anything really) would also work here.
It's a great setup! Just have some watchdog reboot if it can't talk to home (a simple cronjob with ping -c1 home.lan || reboot or similar).
Even our "slow" 35Mbps upload speed is way more than enough for incremental rsyncs of my Immich library. The initial sync was done in person, though.
Good enough. Simple, cheap. Brilliant.
Anyone reading this have any suggestions as to where we all can source cheap high-volume drives, such as refurbs pulled from upgraded old racks?
I got one from goHardDrive on eBay (link). It was cheap enough, looks flawless, and knock on wood has been working fine.
Googling around, the brand gets...mixed reviews. My use case is such that of this drive fails it's not a big deal.
I'm looking to source a cheap trusted family member if anyone has one going?
Location?
Local storage on a VPS is expensive, and I've never been happy with a lower powered server serving media. Personally I self-host and send a backup to Backblaze B2 for offsite (using Rclone).
I use Borgmatic for incremental, deduplicated backups but make sure you save your encryption key somewhere you can access it if your house burns down.
If you're fine with self hosting, you can just self host it and backup your local drives to a remote location. That's what I do.
For backup software, I use Duplicacy. But Veeam, Borg, etc.. would work just fine. For images, since they're just static files and you don't really need a version history, you could get away with a scheduled rsync job. Though, technically that leaves you more at risk of ransomeware or something that overwrites your data.
For remote storage, I'd first consider a Hetzner storage box since they are flat-rate pricing and pretty dang cheap at $13/mo for 5TB. You might also consider StorJ, B2, S3, etc... I'd just stay away from any lesser known ultra-cheap storage providers.
Though, technically that leaves you more at risk of ransomeware or something that overwrites your data.
I rsync as well, but use snapshotting on the remote drives. So, a bad rsync would suck but shouldn't really result in data loss. Ransomware on my local+remote server would of course be very bad...
At such volume it is difficult to come up a service that does not break a bank. Storage is expensive.
Perhaps immich + monthly backups to S3 glacier. That is if you don't have a second and third site available
Yeah it sucks because Microsoft charges $10/mo for 6tb.
Any users here mind sharing their experience?
I run it on a VPS. Works great across oceans. Biggest gripe is that it doesn't load local content first. It checks online and then pulls from those thumbnails. So if you have a weak or slow connection, then you'll get a spinning wheel of death or assets that don't load properly.
My use case:
I use a Synology NAS to backup my photos/videos. On mobile, I use the Synology Photos app for 100% of the backups, because it's been 100% reliable for me over the years.
I basically run Immich in read-only mode, and specifically for searches. The contextual search is incredible, and after putting it side-by-side with a very expensive Windows software that uses local AI search, it came out on top... no contest.
So in that sense, I'm very happy!
Can't really comment on the older versions since I recently deployed the server. However from the past couple of updates, the background syncing has improved on the Android version. Before I had to open the app for it to sync but recent updates now upload media without me having to open the app.
For the app itself, works pretty well. There still seems to be bugs or weird UI changes like adding to albums disappeared when you click a photo or video but its there on the grid view if you hold the file.
Overall it seems pretty stable and it has a dedicated app in both iOS and Android. Use to use nextcloud with memories before.
Happy to share my experience. Pros: capable replacement for Google photos, Face recognition, location map, etc Support for albums and sharing. Support for reading folders from local network
Roll the dice on these, YMMV ( there are not really cons to me but I work in tech and deal with far worse things)
Actively being developed. Good- things are fixed, new features added. Bad, have to update the server regularly , multiple times some weeks.
Cost: free. You get what you pay for. There's a donation cost, and I've been meaning to do that, but for free you may not get the help like for something you pay for. They do have an active community on Discord, so there's that.
Editing in mobile client only.
Exposing to the Internet seems a bit tricky if you plan on doing it right ( securely) but you can use tail scale for external access, works fine.
I've been happy enough with it to turn off my google photo backup . Oh they do warn you to not to use this as your main backup since it's under active development. Something what to consider. Hope this helps, happy to answer questions
Edit: cleaned up grammar for clarity
If you're just interested in the synch part, I've been using it without any issues for several months. Worked in a pixel 6a, upgraded to a pixel 8 pro and continued right where I left off
What's tricky about exposing it to the internet?
Depends, if you're ok exposing an open port to the Internet then its not tricky at all, assuming you know how to port forward and are not double natted. They warn you to not do this though. I second that warning.
This page explains the 3 main options https://docs.immich.app/guides/remote-access/
Ideally you'd just do a reverse proxy, which is the most complex option. Tasks include getting a host, cert, and setting it up.
I went with tail scale, it was easy but requires an additional client component on every device and one in the server.
I'm really happy to see this post acknowledge speed issues where there are many items, 100k+. I have around this and have always found Immich to be laggy, while others say how it's the fastest ever.
I will have to give it another go.
I don't think this feature is live yet, looks like it still needs some internal refinement. At least nothing like this was mentioned in the last few changelogs.
I think you might be right. Others are talking about a rocky start but reading through the recent release notes it seems like a potentially unrelated issue with a release of a new timeline.